[ad_1]
Credit: Janet Mayer/Startraksphoto
Martina Navratilova is “cancer-free.”
Just months after being dealt with a terrifying double diagnosis of breast and throat cancer, the 66-year-old tennis great and wife of the Real Housewives of Miami star Julia Lemigova, 50, has confirmed her health battle has winded down.
“As far as they know I’m cancer-free,” Martina declared during an emotional interview on Piers Morgan‘s TalkTV, via The Sun.
While Martina has a Couple more weeks of radiation left to treat her breast, she said that after it is complete, she “should be good to go.”
Back in November of last year, over a decade after she beat breast cancer for the first time, Martina noticed that one of her lymph nodes was enlarged and ultimately called her doctor, who diagnosed her with stage one throat cancer before finding an 8mm tumor in her right breast.
“This was the first week in December, [I’m thinking] I will see this Christmas but maybe not the next one,” Martina recalled, noting that the double cancer diagnosis left her “very up and down.”
“I was in a total panic for three days thinking I may not see next Christmas,” she shared. “The bucket list came into my mind of all the things I wanted to do. And this may sound really shallow, but I was like, okay, ‘Which kick a– car do I really want to drive if I live like a year?’”
Luckily, despite the potentially grim diagnosis, Martina was told by doctors that her cancer was “extremely treatable” and dealt a 95 percent chance for a full recovery.
“[It was a] big, big relief, but emotionally I’ve been up and down because of what the doctor initially told me,” she explained. “I find out it’s throat cancer, I think I could be dying, but then I find out, no, it’s very treatable. Then when I had the biopsy on the right breast the doctor was saying, ‘This doesn’t look great.’ That’s when I started crying on the table as she’s still poking and getting samples out of my boob. And I’m like, ‘Oh great, now I have two cancers at the same time that are not related. Who else has two cancers at the same time?’”
Although Martina’s cancer battle was just months-long, it put her and Julia’s plans to adopt on an indefinite hold.
“We were waiting for a phone call to welcome a child home and then we were fighting two cancers,” Julia recalled. “So, today the first thing I’m thinking about is for Martina to get well and stronger, and we’ll see what happens.”
But Martina seemed to be leaning away from the idea altogether, saying, “I don’t think it’s going to happen. I think it’s just too complicated and I only have so much energy right now.”
Looking back at her treatment, which included radiation every day for three weeks and three weekly chemotherapy treatments, Martina said she “didn’t realize it was going to be as hard as it really was.”
“You’re just hit from all ends and I don’t think the doctors do a very good job of telling you how the sh-t is going to hit the fan,” she shared.
Still, after seeing the children at the hospital where she was treated going through similar treatments, Martina stopped feeling sorry for herself and decided to “suck it up and deal with it.”
“When you see kids, that’s when you really stop feeling sorry for yourself because of what the parents are going through,” she noted.
According to Julia, she is “so proud” of the way Martina endured her treatments with “so much strength and positivity.”
“When your wife is diagnosed with cancer – and especially two cancers – it puts life into perspective. Everything that seems to be important is suddenly not that important,” she stated.
Part three of the Real Housewives of Miami season five reunion begins streaming this Thursday, March 23, on Peacock.
[ad_2]
Source link